Volume 63
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Elena Esposito, Dominik Hofmann, and Costanza Coloni, "Can a Predicted Future Still Be an Open Future? Algorithmic Forecasts and Actionability in Precision Medicine," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
The openness of the future is rightly considered one of the qualifying aspects of the temporality of modern society. The open future, which does not yet exist in the present, implies radical unpredictability. This article discusses how, in the last few centuries, the resulting uncertainty has been managed with probabilistic tools that compute present information about the future in a controlled way. The probabilistic approach has always been plagued by three fundamental problems: performativity, the need for individualization, and the opacity of predictions. We contrast this approach with recent forms of algorithmic forecasting, which seem to turn these problems into resources and produce an innovative form of prediction. But can a predicted future still be an open future? We explore this specific contemporary modality of historical futures by examining the recent debate about the notion of actionability in precision medicine, which focuses on a form of individualized prediction that enables direct intervention in the future it predicts.
ARTICLES
María Inés La Greca, "With or Against Hayden White? Reflections on Theory of History and Subject Formation," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article reflects on Hayden White's understanding of the subject and explores how best to move forward discussions in theory of history after his arguments about narrativity. To do so, I reconsider his arguments in light of more recent feminist and queer theorizations. Through a reconstruction of the current international new wave of feminism and LGBTQ+ activism as a rich and complex social movement that involves a narration of its own (practical) past, I will recontextualize and revaluate White's insight from the perspective of Judith Butler's theory of subject formation. The argument will unfold in four parts. First, I will recall White's ironic and existential stance on language and narrativity in the representation of reality and in relation to social beliefs. Second, I will again raise the question of the value of narrativity, as framed by White, in the context of the publication of a recent feminist manifesto. It is here that another issue will emerge as crucial: the relationship between the limits of linguistic self-consciousness and the question of the subject. In the third part, my argument will take a partial turn "against White" and toward Butler's subject formation theory. My claim will be that there is a residue of the belief in the sovereign individual in White's insistence on self-consciousness. However, I will also show that his suspicion regarding the psychological impulse toward narrative closure can be re-elaborated as the challenge Butler is facing with their theory of subject formation: that of critically resisting the belief in our being coherent and self-sufficient individuals. In the fourth part, I will present Butler's refiguration of the thesis of the subject's opacity in terms of the primary relationality that binds human beings to one another, and I will offer a new understanding of the individual, norms, agency, infancy, and ethics. Finally, I will conclude that we are bodies in history and that theory of history can find a promising line of research through this conception of the subject, a conception that reframes how we understand the intimate links between political consciousness, historicity, and embodiment. I also claim that this line of research constitutes an ethics for our historical undoing.
Christopher Stedman Parmenter, "The Twilight of the Gods? Genomic History and the Return of Race in the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, aDNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work--a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism. Even worse, some genomic historians continue to make troubling overtures toward the ethnonationalist Right, which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s. This article traces the intellectual genealogy of genomic history from World War II to the present, examines recent attempts to answer criticism from the humanities and social sciences, and suggests paths for responsible use of aDNA in historical and prehistorical scholarship.
Martin Klüners, "The Unconscious in Individuals and Society: On the Application of Psychoanalytic Categories in Historiography," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
The long-held conviction of a mutually exclusive relationship between psychoanalysis, which allegedly proceeds purely in terms of individual psychology, and historical social science, which is interested primarily in the analysis of collectives, has significantly hindered dialogue between the disciplines. Norbert Elias's "figurational" sociology, which has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and group therapy, has the potential to indicate a way in which social science-oriented historical research might investigate the network of relations between individual and "collective" psychic processes without relying on artificial dichotomies. Elias's figurational theory, for its part, does not sufficiently take into account the question of a collective or social unconscious, so this article examines approaches that attempt to explore and conceptually define a supra-individual unconscious.
Mark Ian Thomas Robson, "Acts of Thought and Re-Enactment in Collingwood's Philosophy of History," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article explores one of Collingwood's most puzzling claims--that, in re-enacting a past act of thought, I can revive not just the propositional content of that act but also the very act of thought itself. This aspect of Collingwood's ideas has been largely ignored, and, when not ignored, it has been almost universally rejected. After all, we might ask, how can it be that two acts of thought--one, say, had by Carol in the library on Wednesday and another act of thought had by Harold in his study on Thursday--are literally identical? I explore this baffling claim and, in particular, Collingwood's argument that acts of thought can have the identity of a continuant. I try to show how the idea of the identity of the continuant might be used to remove some of the puzzlement in Collingwood's claim about literal identity between acts of thought; I thus show how Harold, on Thursday, might be able to experience the exact same act of thought that Carol had on Wednesday.
Vanita Seth, "(Un)Doing History: A Case for Epistemological Alterity," History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension concerns the fraught relationship between history as a site of knowledge production with some proximity to engaging and producing truth and history as constructed, wherein its purported object of study, the past, is not an ontological fact but a cultural artifact. In this instance, what we witness is less a debate among scholars within history than an amorphic anxiety about history. This article makes a case for engaging the radical alterity that confronts the historian of the Middle Ages. It does so, however, cognizant of an ontological impasse: if alterity is attentive to difference, a difference that resists translation into modern knowledge regimes, then what does it mean to engage it historically--that is, through a temporal structure that would have been foreign to the very period of study?
REVIEW ESSAY
Anna Duensing on Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture by Bruce Kuklick, History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Ethan Kleinberg, "True North," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
In this article, I suggest that our current relation to the sociopolitical future is one where we are blocked from changing our view of what that future is or could be. In this sense, we are trapped in a time loop wherein the challenges before us are continuously met with social and political solutions designed for futures past, old futures. These past possible futures are ones that failed to solve the problems they were offered to address. As such, there is no growth, change, or redemption that could activate a new future; there is only the rehearsal of the old ones: failed futures from the past. What's more, this process of defuturing also relies on a winnowing of the past such that only those pasts that align with our present are allowed to be brought forward. I argue that, to reactivate our future, we also need to reactivate our pasts. I am thinking of those pasts that we do not seek or do not want but that nevertheless come to us. These are the multiple and competing pasts that swirl with present and future as in a vortex, denying any one past the privilege of guiding, directing, or foreclosing the future. It is only by facing this vortex and reopening the past that we can re-open the future and escape the time loop of our ever-receding horizon.
ARTICLES
Gavin Lucas, "Adventures in Tideland," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
One of the more significant issues to have emerged from the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has concerned the apparent incommensurability of human and natural history and the vastly different timescales involved. More generally, such discourse raises critical questions about the very different way time is conceptualized in the natural sciences as opposed to in the social sciences and humanities. In this article, I draw on my own disciplinary background in archaeology in order to contribute to these differences and build bridges between the two disciplinary domains by foregrounding the materiality of time. I use a partly allegorical approach inspired by Edwin Abbott's nineteenth-century novel Flatland to investigate a notion of three-dimensional of time, which I compare with Gilles Deleuze's three temporal syntheses. The article argues for the concept of Thick Time, which emphasizes the importance of time as constituted by things, whereby things make time rather than exist within it. A material time is one that foregrounds time as a mode of transmission, a "passing on," and of the persistence of the past in the present.
Lisa Regazzoni, "The Uncertain Stuff of History: Outline of a Theory of Intentionality--Thing by Thing," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
This article addresses the issue of historical knowledge in relation to material evidence. More specifically, it asks, What objects capture the historian's attention and what knowledge is gained from those objects? What does the historian's gaze select as "things of history" and thus as removed from a world of object assemblages and fluid matter? Is it the case that only artifacts deliberately produced or modified by humans (regardless of the purpose) count as "things of history"? Or do physical entities produced by unintended human and nonhuman factors also display temporal endurance or alteration occurring over time and resonate with humans? Are "things of history" only entities endowed with shape, or do formless materials qualify too? In this article, I outline a theory of intentionality in relation to material items for two main reasons. First, it allows for a "critique of material evidence," which is still missing in the historical discipline. Second, it enables us to address any remaining epistemological, ethical, or political issues, biases, or contradictions associated with the multifaceted research on material culture that affect the way we do history.
Daniel Cunningham, "Class and Class Consciousness According to E. P. Thompson," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
In this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays "The Peculiarities of the English" and "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" In the first section, I argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that Thompson developed a genuinely historical materialist theory of class formation as a "structured process" that moves from class struggle to class consciousness, a theory that complicates the frequent description of Thompson as a "voluntarist." In the second section, I take a more critical position toward Thompson's understanding of class, discussing a tension between this notion of class as structured process and his numerous invocations of class as a form of "lived experience" whose diversity and unpredictability exceed theorization. This tension aside, Thompson claims that, in the case of the nineteenth-century English working class, to which he dedicated so much research, lived experience coincided with the more general structured process he posits. In the third section, therefore, I more fully elaborate on this specific process of class formation as Thompson portrays it, identifying and discussing three intertwined threads: (1) a movement from a past-oriented defense of traditional institutions to a future-oriented demand for reforms, (2) the development of oppositional, class-specific pedagogical institutions and practices, and (3) the creation of a distinct class culture (which Thompson closely aligns with the achievement of class consciousness) that is aware both of itself and of its antagonism with other classes.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Ekin Erkan, "Beneath Meaning, Orientational Narratives, and Dante's Essentialist Theory of Art: On Noël Carroll's Elucidations and Contestations," History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
In this review of Noël Carroll's Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art: Essays, I focus on the issue of Danto's philosophy of art history and Carroll's position that, unlike Danto, we ought to understand Danto's "end of art (history)" thesis as an orientational narrative (that is, a pragmatic-instrumental narrative with cognitive purchase) rather than as a historical-scientific narrative. In making this case, I show how Carroll's argument demonstrates that Danto's "end of art (history)" thesis is in tension with Danto's philosophy of history. Furthermore, I engage and respond to the most substantive critiques that Carroll proffers in this text, especially as they concern Danto's philosophy of art history and the related issue of Danto's (art) historically anchored search for a definition of art. In giving special attention to the socio-historical background conditions (namely, "the artworld" conditions) for an object to be conferred art status, I also show how Carroll's incisive reading offers a critical rejoinder to claims made by recent critics such as Robert B. Pippin and Ivan Gaskell, who have dehistoricized Danto's definition of art, claiming that it allows for any artist to enfranchise any object as an artwork, proper.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Alexandra Lianeri on Translation and History: A Textbook by Theo Hermans, History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
Juhan Hellerma on Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World by Hartmut Rosa, History and Theory 63, no. 2 (2024).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, "The Opening of Historical Futures," History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the "Historical Futures" collective research endeavor pulls together the threads of its four years of explorative work by showcasing an opening of historical futures. Against the persisting myth of the closure of the future in contemporary societies, it claims that, as long as the future remains contested by virtue of the multiplicity of historical futures that societal practices and discourses entail or advocate, there can be no closure of the future. In support of this claim, the project-closing piece outlines the reasons why the future is more radically open than ever and surveys the findings of the project contributions with the frame provided by the contemporary opening of historical futures.
THE NINTH HISTORY AND THEORY LECTURE
Johanna Drucker, "Inventing the Alphabet: The Technologies of Knowledge Production," History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
ARTICLES
D. Graham Burnett, "The Eye and the Mind: Mary Cheves West Perky, Imaginative Phenomenology, and the Historiography of Reverse Hallucination," History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
Revisiting the remarkable experimental work of the pioneering early twentieth-century psychologist Mary Cheves West Perky (1875-1940), this article argues for the historiographical significance of her counterintuitive findings concerning the human imagination and the phenomenon of "reverse hallucination." By means of an exhaustive and forensic archival inquiry, this article reconstructs Perky's heretofore (essentially) unknown biography, providing new insights into the context and broader importance of her research, both with respect to the history of the human sciences and in relation to the history of American artistic modernism. At the same time, these pages recursively deploy her distinctive perspective on the way the perceptual experiences of reality inosculate with projective fantasy, activating her findings as a component of a nontraditional disciplinary practice.
Luigi Alonzi, "Language--History--Presence," History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
This article deals with the use of language in historiography and with this usage's implications for the conception of history and the historiographical operation/practice. Whereas theorists of "presence" believe that "presence" and "reality" can be grasped in spoken language and written texts, thus generally considering them as a medium that enables access to a "reality" that lies beyond texts and language, I argue that language and texts should themselves be considered as a "reality." We need to distinguish the process of "presentification" performed by words from the presence of language as a lexical and physical reality; though the two aspects are strictly connected, the presence of language needs to be emphasized as a lexical-semantic system and as a thing in the world. In this article, I consider language as a "living witness" of the narrated events; it is a presence in the moment that events occurred and a presence that is still present. We should think of language as we think of the material world around us--that is, as a transformed landscape that contains present and absent pasts. Historians of "presence" consider the meanings associated with language as a major obstacle obstructing the understanding of history in a new unmediated way; to some extent, this article is an attempt to hold meaning and presence together.
Lawrence Rosen, "Validating Historical Interpretations: An Approach from Cultural Anthropology," History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
Historians and anthropologists share a common problem of setting criteria for the validation of their interpretations. While many features are shared and explicit--for example, that a full range of data needs to be considered and that information should be reliably sourced--the actual criteria for assessing supportable interpretations are frequently left unexamined. Following consideration of schemes that have been put forth for validating interpretation in literature, this article considers the criteria applied to the history of an Indonesian town and those employed when scholars have revisited the site of a predecessor's research. Because no interpretation is without some theoretical backdrop, this article considers a particular theory of culture that may facilitate the refinement of standards. The criteria that are then suggested--conjuncture, scope, intersection, comparability, and self-accounting--may help to pinpoint not uniquely correct interpretations but better or worse ones. To test these criteria, this article briefly analyzes two case studies of both historical and anthropological concern: one relates to the history and organization of tribal-based polities and the other concerns the dispute over the circumstances surrounding the death of Captain James Cook. The article concludes that reinvigorating a conversation about such criteria can reinforce the shared interests of historians and anthropologists that have proven so fruitful to recent scholarship.
Luuk de Boer, "Painting History: Picture, Witness, and Ancient Historiography," History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
This article treats an analogy that is used persistently in the history of historiography: the equation of historiography with painting and the identification of the historiographer with the painter. In examining the conceptual stakes of this (auto)identification, the article mobilizes the analogy in order to explore larger issues of historical theory and, through the prism of historical painting, reflects on the problem of representation and narrativist approaches to history as text. The article argues that the historiographic desire surfacing in a comparison with painting does not concern painting's ability to capture the past; rather, it concerns its ability to capture the viewer. Opening with a brief survey of the ut pictura historia analogy in the history of historiography, the article makes this claim by analyzing historiographical engagements with the analogy in antiquity (turning to Herodotus and Polybius) and by exploring ancient history painting itself (offering pride of place to the Alexander Mosaic). In thus engaging with the theory of historiography via concrete historical material, the article leverages a historical episode of interaction between textual media and visual media to find that they are structured by the same simple desire that continues to exert its force today: the desire to see for oneself.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Chris Lorenz on The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Perspective of Meaning by Jonas Ahlskog, History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
Lucian Hölscher on Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich by Christopher Clark, History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
Ovidiu Stanciu on Historia fallida by Kalle Pihlainen, translated by Rodrigo Zamorano, History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024).
HISTORY AND ETHICS
Herman Paul, "A Virtue Ethics for Historians: Prospects and Limitations," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
How feasible would it be to develop a virtue ethics for historians that is analogous or similar to virtue-ethical approaches to research integrity that have been proposed for other areas of academic inquiry? The field of history is an interesting one, as few disciplines have an equally well-documented history of thinking, talking, and writing about virtues. This history merits ethicists’ attention, as it offers a unique opportunity for grounding ethical reflection in the lived realities of historical research and teaching. In the spirit of a “history and philosophy of history,” this article contributes to such a project by staging a conversation between virtue ethics and the history of historiography. Drawing on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples, it argues that much of what applied virtue ethicists are recommending scholars to do has a long pedigree in the history of historiography. Critical virtue ethics, too, is a project to which historians can easily relate, especially insofar as they are committed to virtues of truthfulness in an age of post-truth. If this suggests that there is room, or perhaps even a need, for a virtue ethics for historians, the cases examined in this article also prompt critical questions, especially ones regarding the teachability of virtue, the potential of virtue talk to be misused for polemical and exclusionary purposes, and the sort of tasks that a virtue ethics is capable of addressing. In light of these considerations, the article calls for reflection on the “affordances” of virtue. It claims that the case for a virtue ethics will be strongest if it is grounded in a realistic understanding not only of the beneficial uses to which categories of virtue can be put but also of unintended uses to which virtue talk is susceptible and of tasks for which virtue thinking is less prepared.
Jonas Ahlskog, "'Testimony Stops Where History Begins': Understanding and Ethics in Relation to Historical and Practical Pasts," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
This article explores the relation between testimony and history by considering the recent “ethical turn” toward experience and memory in historical research. By way of a brief history of the concept of testimony in historical research, the article pinpoints current discussions as being about historical understanding rather than factual knowledge about the past. With reference to the revaluation of history within the linguistic turn, influential historical theorists have argued that abandoning objectivism calls for a rapprochement between historical research and attempts to make sense of the past in accounts of memory. Both history and memory accounts, they argue, offer forms of understanding that are equally conditioned by language as well as politics, culture, and identity. Thus, the inclusion of testimony has been framed as not only legitimate but also important for an “ethical” understanding of the past within historiographical discourse. In relation to this development, the article shows that abandoning objectivism in the wake of the linguistic turn cannot justify a general rapprochement between history and memory accounts. On the contrary, abandoning objectivism only increases the importance of appreciating the conceptual distinction between testimony and history as different forms of understanding. For clarifying the conceptual distinction, the article reexamines R. G. Collingwood's (in)famous contention that “testimony … stops where history begins.” Collingwood's main point was not, as previous interpreters have argued, only about epistemology but was about the qualitative difference between historical and practical pasts. In conclusion, the article articulates the importance of the distinction between history and practice in relation to questions about the historian's ethical responsibility.
Taynna M. Marino, "How Should Historians Empathize?," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
Reflecting on the ethical and unethical ways of empathizing is a necessary task for historians interested in the ethics of history. Research on empathy often classifies its various parts into affective, cognitive, and prosocial dimensions. However, in historical scholarship, the cognitive-intellectual dimension of empathy is overemphasized to the detriment of its affective and prosocial dimensions, whose roles in determining the ways historians should practice history are often disregarded. In this article, I will discuss the relations between empathy and ethics and how historians should empathize. Doing so, I argue that empathy's ethical potential for historical scholarship needs to be de-intellectualized by historical scholarship, a task that requires a complementary and supplementary approach to empathy that is in dialogue with moral philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, and animal studies. Only by recognizing empathy as a socially developed evolutionary capacity shared among humans and other species can historians fully develop its possibilities as a tool to guide human morality and ethical decision-making. Finally, I will claim that empathy as an ethical imperative for an ethics of care and vulnerability should guide historians' ethics toward more responsive and responsible ways of relating with others across time, space, cultures, generations, species, and so on.
Anna Clark, "What Is History in a Settler Colonial Society? Mapping the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical Historiography Using an Australian Case Study," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
In recent decades, the role of the history discipline as part of the architecture of colonization has become more visible and better understood. Such acknowledgement reflects foundational shifts in historical practice and theory prompted by transdisciplinary and transnational scholarship in fields such as postcolonial and settler-colonial studies, First Nations knowledges, and historical perspectives and practices contextualized by transatlantic slavery. Their intervention in turn prompted a vital question: How do we map settler-colonial historiography if the discipline has been complicit in the settler-colonial project? Using Australian historiography as a case study, this article explores how History has been part of the architecture of colonization, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. Drawing on the work of Indigenous history-makers and knowledge-holders, it also points to ways that researchers might reach outside the traditional scope of historiography to map and contemplate the range of history-making that comprises history in the settler colony.
Q. Edward Wang, "Truthful Is Moral: Practicing Ethical Responsibility in Chinese Historiography," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
In recent years, efforts have been made to reevaluate the tradition of Chinese historical thought and writing. This article seeks to further these efforts and offer a new understanding of the characteristics of historical writing in traditional China. It argues that, at the level of practice, traditional Chinese historians, like their counterparts in the rest of the world, were deeply concerned with establishing and communicating facts in historical writing. Their separation of commentary and narrative in order to practice “straight writing” of the latter is a telling example, one that evolved into an enshrined tradition over the long span of imperial China. At the theoretical level, Chinese historians also consciously explored the ways in which truthfulness in history could be reconciled with the ethical responsibilities they perceived and sought to assume in and for their time. This quest did not stop at the level of “praise and blame” for past personalities and events. Rather, their practice amounted to an effort, epitomized by the historical practice of the Song period (960–1279), to search for the metaphysics of historical morality, or the immanent and overarching principles that guide human society.
Zachary Conn, "A House with Exposed Beams: Inquiry-Based Learning and Historians' Ethical Responsibilities as Scholar-Teachers," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
This is an article about the relationship between historical scholarship and pedagogy. The teaching of history can itself be seen as a meaningful form of historical scholarship and poses some of the same methodological, theoretical, and ethical questions as historical research, albeit usually generating quite different answers to the queries. I delve into three sets of questions that are of significance to historians in our roles as researchers and as teachers. In scholarship and in teaching, it pays to consider the relationship between authority and humility. In the library and the classroom, there is a balance to be struck between narrative and analysis. In both settings, one must at times choose between historicist particularity and human universalism. I discuss each set of tensions with reference to such thinkers as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In each case, I also draw on my own experience in the classroom, particularly my time teaching tenth-grade world history. Throughout, I suggest that intellectually and ethically flourishing history classrooms are often “houses with exposed beams,” in which teachers initiate students as junior members in communities of historical inquiry, often, though not always, through collaborative analyses of revealing primary documents.
Natan Elgabsi, "What Is Responsibility toward the Past? Ethical, Existential, and Transgenerational Dimensions," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
Today, there is a growing interest in the ethics of the human and social sciences, and in the discussions surrounding these topics, notions such as responsibility toward the past are often invoked. But those engaged in these discussions seldom acknowledge that there are at least two distinct logics of responsibility underlying many debates. These logics permeate a Western scholarly tradition but are seldom explicitly discussed. The two logics follow the Latin and Hebrew concepts of responsibility: spondeo and acharayut. The purpose of this article is to make an ethical argument: to explain, based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and others, what kind of ethical-existential logic of responsibility acharayut is and how it differs from and challenges other concepts of responsibility in moral philosophy and the human sciences. I am especially concerned with what this logic implies with regard to reading and writing about the past. Responsibility is not necessarily congruent with performing a scientific (historical) task or defending the (political, juridical) interests of a group of people. Instead, a “guiltless responsibility” to people of other generations points to something that I refer to as a transgenerational responsibility. I contrast this transgenerational responsibility to inherited guilt and related ideas of generational interconnectedness, which follow the logic of spondeo. Inherited guilt suggests that a responsible relation the past is to either identify with or blame a group of people in the past. Contrary to inherited guilt, a commitment to acharayut means constantly probing one's responsibility to people of the past (for their posterity) and people of the future (as their predecessors) precisely because people of the present are not people of the past or people of the future.
Antoon De Baets, "Open Letters in Closed Societies: The Values of Historians Under Attack," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
This article explores a question of practical ethics: To which values do historians appeal when they come under sustained attack from political power? An important instrument of historians living in closed societies to express their values is the open letter, defined as an unauthorized public statement cast in epistolary form and addressed to either political leaders or fellow historians, but always with the general public as a silent reader in the background. Limited to the post-1945 period, a search for such open letters yielded 106 examples from 39 countries in closed and open societies. Four types of open letters were identified: those describing repression effects, those rebutting official historical views, those defending basic principles, and those presenting transitional historiography. Nine telling cases from six closed societies were then reviewed in detail and analyzed from a variety of angles (authorship, rhetoric, audience, impact, criticism, regime stage, and regime type). When these cases were examined in light of the initial question, it was found that most letters contained a great diversity of values but focused on how the human rights of historians were threatened. Invariably, their theme was historical writing in its full breadth, including its documentary infrastructure and its ramifications in education and the public sphere. Respect for historical truth was invoked more than any other value. It was a minimalist truth conception, however, understood as the absence of historical lies and falsification. The reason for this emphasis on an integrity-oriented conception of historical truth may lie in an old and deep-seated professional fear: the fear that the dictator's corrupted and divisive version of history survives and triumphs as the final verdict.
For Romanian translation of this article, see: Antoon De Baets, "Scrisori Deschise în Societăți Închise: Valorile Istoricilor sub Atac," Noua Revistă de Drepturile Omului [New Journal of Human Rights], 2025 no. 1, 87–112.
Carolyn J. Dean, "Bystanders, Jews, and Historical Interpretation," History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024).
This article revisits the vast historiography on everyday life in Vichy France to address the moral questions and historical claims implicit in the bystander category. It addresses how historians conceive the relationship between bystanders and Jews, arguing that they implicitly erase the structural violence between the two groups by reproducing the liberal ethics implicit in the slogan “never again” in their own method—and in spite of their commitment to a boundary between history and memory. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial and political theory, it suggests that the category, if rethought, might account for popular complicity in genocidal violence.
